After leaving school in 1925 Evelyn spent a year at home, resisting the idea of going to art school. We do not know exactly why. It is possible that she had some impetuous ideas of earning her living as a professional artist. Sharing the tower studio at The Cedars with her mother, she had a little success with both writing and illustrating undemanding children’s stories with titles like ‘Jolly Nice’, ‘The Garden of Delight’ and ‘Washing Day’, some published by Dean & Son, who also published Lucie Mabel Attwell and Enid Blyton. The meticulously drawn and agreeably bourgeois Hot Pie is typical of Dunbar’s work in this genre.